ELSA: Exploiting Layer-wise N:M Sparsity for Vision Transformer Acceleration
$N{:}M$ sparsity is an emerging model compression method supported by more and more accelerators to speed up sparse matrix multiplication in deep neural networks. Most existing $N{:}M$ sparsity methods compress neural networks with a uniform setting for all layers in a network or heuristically determine the layer-wise configuration by considering the number of parameters in each layer. However, very few methods have been designed for obtaining a layer-wise customized $N{:}M$ sparse configuration for vision transformers (ViTs), which usually consist of transformer blocks involving the same number of parameters. In this work, to address the challenge of selecting suitable sparse configuration for ViTs on $N{:}M$ sparsity-supporting accelerators, we propose ELSA, Exploiting Layer-wise $N{:}M$ Sparsity for ViTs. Considering not only all $N{:}M$ sparsity levels supported by a given accelerator but also the expected throughput improvement, our methodology can reap the benefits of accelerators supporting mixed sparsity by trading off negligible accuracy loss with both memory usage and inference time reduction for ViT models. For instance, our approach achieves a noteworthy 2.9$\times$ reduction in FLOPs for both Swin-B and DeiT-B with only a marginal degradation of accuracy on ImageNet. Our code will be released upon paper acceptance.
Code (1)
Tasks
Model CompressionMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
ELSA: An ELastic SNN Inference Architecture for Efficient Neuromorphic Computing
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) exploit event-driven and addition-only computation to substantially improve efficiency for intelligent computation. A key temporal property of SNNs, elastic inference, allows outputs to eme…
The Unseen Frontier: Pushing the Limits of LLM Sparsity with Surrogate-Free ADMM
Neural network pruning is a promising technique to mitigate the excessive computational and memory requirements of large language models (LLMs). Despite its promise, however, progress in this area has diminished, as conv…
Network PruningELSA: Partial Weight Freezing for Overhead-Free Sparse Network Deployment
We present ELSA, a practical solution for creating deep networks that can easily be deployed at different levels of sparsity. The core idea is to embed one or more sparse networks within a single dense network as a prope…
ELSAA: Efficient Low-Rank and Sparse Attention Approximation for Training Transformers
The quadratic $N\times N$ attention score matrix remains a central obstacle to extending Transformers to longer input lengths. Existing efficient attention methods usually reduce this bottleneck by either imposing sparsi…
ELSA: Enhanced Local Self-Attention for Vision Transformer
Self-attention is powerful in modeling long-range dependencies, but it is weak in local finer-level feature learning. The performance of local self-attention (LSA) is just on par with convolution and inferior to dynamic …
Image ClassificationInstance SegmentationObject DetectionSemantic Segmentation